Savage Lessons: A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance (Vicious Boys of Marter High Book 1)

by Elle East

  I don’t understand why they are protecting us, but I can tell there’s a lot they aren’t telling us. There is no way they are doing all this just because of their part of the stupid Threesome Pact where they are supposed to protect me.

  The Threesome Pact was more of an East Marters thing—Daire kept rolling his eyes whenever he referred to it—so why are they bothering to uphold their end of the bargain? And why had they taken over the Pact from the East Marters in the first place? Now that I knew more about the dynamic between the two groups, that act seemed especially risky.

  Why do they seem to care so much, but at the same time so little?

  Something else was going on and it had something to do with us—that was pretty much the only thing that Olivia and I agreed on right now.

  It’s the middle of the third day since Brax came. Olivia and I just got into a fight so she’s in her room and I’m reading on the couch. The house is quiet because the twins are at school and Alec’s mom is off somewhere.

  Suddenly, there’s a loud bang upstairs and I jump off the couch and my book falls to the floor. I stare in fear up the stairs at the door. Have the East Marters found us?

  There’s another loud thud, but even though this one is louder, it’s more muffled. I wait, barely breathing.

  There are no further sounds.

  Eventually, Olivia tiptoes out of her room. “What was that?” she whispers, barely audible.

  I shrug.

  After a couple of minutes I decide that I’m sick of waiting for the bad guys to come get us. We have to go see what that was. The not knowing is the worst part.

  I motion for Olivia to stay back and ignore her when she shakes her head and mouths, “NO.” I start going up the stairs very slowly. I’m trying not to make any sound so I climb at a snail’s pace.

  At the top, I press my ear against the door and listen. I think I can hear faint raspy sounds but I’m not really sure what it is. After a few minutes I decide to open the door. I unlock it as quietly as I can and then turn the handle. No one bursts in the second it’s unlocked so I count that as a good sign and open it a crack to peek.

  Then I throw it open and rush out.

  Theo is laying there, the front door still wide open behind him. There’s a trail of blood across the floor where he fell. He’s clearly hurt and breathing shallowly.

  I call his name and he groans softly in response.

  There’s blood pooling on the wooden floor underneath his massive body, but where is it coming from? I circle him until I find the source. He has a large chunk missing out of the left side of his torso.

  “Oh my god!” Olivia yells as she sees him from the basement door.

  “Help me!” I yell.

  “Do what?!”

  Theo is moaning in pain and I’m not really sure what to do.

  “Get paper towels, a bowl of water, and see if you can find bandaids or tape or something to stop the bleeding,” I say before turning back to Theo. I kneel down next to him. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

  He’s barely conscious but at the mention of hospital he comes to and says no. I argue with him for a bit but he’s emphatic.

  “NO HOSPITALS.” Then he slips back to being barely conscious.

  “Fuck,” I mumble.

  Olivia comes back with the water and paper towels.

  “Are we taking him to a hospital?” she asks.

  “He said no so we are just going to have to treat him the best we can with what we have here.”

  “I don’t know if he’s in the best condition to be making those types of decisions right now…”

  “Olivia! We have to hurry!”

  “Ok, ok, I’ll go get the other stuff.”

  She rushes off and I’m alone with the injured giant again. I start mopping up the blood pouring out of the gash. As I clean it, I realize it’s not as large as I initially thought, but it is a hole that goes straight through his body.

  “Did you get shot?” I ask.

  He nods his head in confirmation. He’s pretty out of it and I figure he’s lost a lot of blood. I press the paper towels against the wound, but they are immediately soaked through. I call to Olivia to get real towels.

  She comes back with an armful of fancy white towels and a roll of duct tape. I figure Alec’s mom is going to be pretty pissed about us using her good towels—given that she doesn’t seem to like Theo at all—but I couldn’t care less at this moment. I take a towel and hold it firmly against him, and when that one is completely soaked, I take the next one and continue the process.

  “He’s loosing a lot of blood,” Olivia says nervously.

  “I know. I don’t know how to stop it.” I press harder. “Go find something to disinfect this.”

  She runs off and returns shortly with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. The blood flowing out has slowed a little bit so I decide to try to disinfect it now. I tell Theo that this is going to hurt, then I take the bottle, uncap it, and pour it on the oozing gash.

  His large body jerks and he howls in pain through clenched teeth. When he quiets down again, I quickly take a fresh towel and wrap the wound. I tell Olivia to give me strips of duct tape and then I use half the roll taping the towel to Theo’s body.

  I keep pressure on the wound to try to get it to stop bleeding—or at least slow down as much as possible given the fact that he has a big gunshot through his abdomen. Luckily, the injury is pretty close to the side of his body and doesn’t look like it’s in a place with any internal organs. The main problem is all the blood he’s lost.

  “What do we do now?” Olivia asks.

  It’s a good question. First step is to close the front door—because we are hovering over a gigantic, tattooed guy, and there’s blood everywhere. Without taking my hands off of Theo, I reach over and kick it shut with my foot.

  The next step isn’t so clear.

  I decide that if he can stand, we should take him downstairs to wait for the other guys so we don’t freak out Alec’s mom and she doesn’t call the cops—Theo clearly doesn’t want the authorities involved.

  “Olivia, come help. Theo, we’re going to help you down the stairs. Do you think you can walk?”

  He grunts and I take that to mean that he can, so Olivia and I each grab one massive arm—which are as big as our legs—and try to help him. We pull at the same time as he stands, but it feels like he weighs a million pounds of muscle. There’s no way we can move him by ourselves so luckily he’s able to kind of stumble to his feet.

  Once he’s kind of on his feet, Olivia and I go under his arms to support him. He’s waving back and forth dangerously. He’s clearly unsteady on his feet and if he falls, I don’t think we can stop him.

  If he was standing to his full height, his armpits would be way above our shoulders, but he’s slumped over so he’s resting his considerable weight on us.

  “He’s crushing me!” Olivia calls as she grunts with the effort of keeping him upright.

  “Me too, but we just have to get him down the stairs.”

  “Are you kidding me??”

  I ignore her and start walking. I’m still putting pressure on his wound with one of my hands.

  “Can you make it down?” I ask him when we are at the top.

  “Yeah,” he says weakly. He sounds so far gone it’s terrifying, but we have to keep going.

  I put his hand on the railing and he grips it, then we start down the stairs. It’s hard to maneuver someone who is literally twice your weight. There’s a couple close calls where I think we are all going to tumble to the bottom and he’s going to crush us, but eventually we make it.

  Theo can’t walk anymore and sinks to the ground. The trip down took everything he had left out of him. I run into my room and grab my pillows and blanket. I throw them out into the main room before going back and pulling the mattress off the bed.

  With a lot of effort I manage to shove it on its side and slide it out to where Theo is laying on the floor in a quickly expanding poo
l of blood. I let the mattress fall next to him and then start trying to coax him onto the bed. Olivia and I help push him so that he rolls painfully onto it. Blood soaks into the mattress and it’s immediately ruined, but I don’t care. Theo’s life is more important than a mattress.

  I put the pillows under his head and cover him with a blanket. It’s now that I get the chance to properly look at him, and he does not look good. His chiseled features now look sunken and his skin has a gray tint to it. There’s a look of pain on his face and it pulls at something in my heart. I hate to see him like this.

  “OK, we need to clean up upstairs and also someone needs to hold the towel against him. Which do you want to do?” I ask.

  “Uh, I guess hold the towel,” Olivia says reluctantly.

  “OK, but you need to hold it really tight. Try not to let anymore blood out if you can.”

  I head upstairs and now that Theo’s body isn’t covering it I’m shocked at the amount of blood that’s all over the floor. It looks like somebody was literally murdered here with an axe. I don’t have much time to think about it though because I don’t know when Alec’s mom is coming home, so I get to work.

  I find a bucket and mop in the closet, and garbage bags to throw out the blood-soaked towels. I’m not sure how long it takes me, but it feels like forever. Finally, I’ve finished the upstairs and head down. The stairs are covered as well so I start on those.

  “My hand is falling asleep,” Olivia complains.

  She’s sitting on the floor next to Theo with her other hand under her chin, looking uncomfortable and bored. I notice that Theo’s tan skin is shockingly pale and fear stabs me in the heart.

  “Is he dead?” I whisper.

  Olivia looks back at him in horror. I rush down to check his pulse. I can’t find it in his wrist.

  “Fuck,” I mumble.

  I try his neck, but it’s so muscular and thick that I can’t find the vein. I call his name, but there’s no response. He looks as still as a corpse. I’m terrified that he’s really dead, but I realize that it’s more than just not wanting to deal with a body. I don’t want Theo to be gone.

  I call his name louder and realize by the quiver in my voice that I’m on the verge of tears. He still doesn’t respond.

  “We should have taken him to the hospital.” I can tell Olivia is about to cry too.

  “Theo?”

  He lies lifeless. In a last-ditch effort to revive him, I raise my hands up and slam my fists down onto his chest.

  He coughs and sputters back to life. Olivia cheers.

  Relief floods through me like a wave and without thinking I lean down and kiss him.

  His lips are surprisingly soft for such a menacing guy. After a second, I feel him kissing me back gently. Through the smell of blood I can smell leather and cinnamon.

  A couple seconds later it finally dawns on me what I’m doing and I pull back. Theo’s eyes are still closed but I can see his big chest rise and fall with his breath, and there’s a tiny bit of color back in his face.

  Olivia looks at me like I’ve gone insane.

  “What I said before at the party, I was just trying to be mean, but… are you like actually banging all of them?” she asks.

  “No!” I protest. “I’ve only slept with one of them.”

  Her mouth drops open. “Which one?!”

  I realize I inadvertently told her more than I want her to know, but it’s too late to take it back now. “Alec.”

  “Really? I would have thought it would be Daire. You clearly like him.”

  “Oh my god, why does everyone think I like him? I don’t!”

  24

  We finally get a chance to look at our phones and the rest of the Vicious Crew have been messaging us, asking if Theo is with us. I text them that he is, but that they need to get here ASAP because he’s not doing so well. I then go to clean the rest of the blood off the stairs while Olivia continues to hold the towel against Theo’s wound.

  When I’m finally finished with the stairs, I’m exhausted. I head into the washroom to clean up and I’m shocked when I see myself in the mirror. I am absolutely covered in Theo’s blood. My clothes are drenched and my hair is sticking to my blood-covered skin. It’s insane to think he could lose so much and still be alive. I shiver. He almost died—and he might still die.

  I quickly shower and put on new clothes. I go back out to relieve Olivia. She’s grateful and runs into the bathroom to shower off too.

  The blood has seeped around the edges of the duct tape, but it’s definitely not as bad as when he first got here. I hold it tight against his hard side. His face is scrunched slightly in pain. His scarred brow furrowed. I wonder where he got that scar? I hope I get the chance to ask him.

  I stare at his face until I hear sounds upstairs. There’s a hard knock on the door. I don’t want to leave Theo, but Olivia is out of the shower so she jogs up the stairs and lets them in.

  The other three members of the Vicious Crew swarm around Theo immediately. Brax is swearing, Alec is leaning down next to me to inspect the amateur job I did of dressing the wound, and Daire is on the phone.

  After a couple quick words, Daire gets off the phone and tells us that a doctor will be here in twenty minutes.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  Alec tells me that Theo was coming here to bring Olivia and I more supplies, but he must have gotten ambushed on the way. My blood runs cold as he says it.

  “So they know where we are?” I ask.

  Alec looks at Daire warily. “We aren’t sure. Only Theo would know and he’s not really in a position to tell us at the moment.”

  “Even if they do know, we can’t leave Theo,” Daire adds. “We’ll have to stay here until it’s safe to move him.”

  “He was really insistent on not going to the hospital,” Olivia says.

  Alec explains that the whole city is corrupt. If Theo went to the hospital, the EMs and the East Marters would have known he was there within the hour. He explained that all the gangs have their own doctors they use when someone gets hurt. No hospitals.

  We wait in tense silence until the doctor finally arrives. She takes one look at Theo and immediately rushes to work on him. We all move to the couches to wait. The three other guys are too anxious to sit and keep pacing.

  Finally, she calls us over and tells us that Theo is in a really bad place. She says he’s lost a lot of blood and if he’d lost much more he would have died. She says he was lucky in that the bullet passed all the way through and didn’t hit anything major.

  “I’ve sewn up the wound as best I can, and dressed it, but the rest is just a waiting game. If we were at the hospital, I’d give him a blood transfusion, but I don’t have any on hand. I can try to get some but it’s very hard to steal,” she says. “Whoever did this make shift dressing with the towel, I’m impressed. If it wasn’t for that he would have lost a lot more and would probably be dead right now.”

  “It was Addison,” Olivia says.

  “Well, good job, Addison,” the doctor says before turning to Daire. “I have to get back to the hospital, but I’ll be back to check on him later this evening. Keep him comfortable and call me if anything changes.”

  Daire nods and then walks her up the stairs. Brax and Alec are staring at me, looking guarded but grateful when they thank me. Daire comes back and gruffly thanks me as well.

  “Why did you do it though? Thought you hated us?” Daire asks sarcastically.

  “I couldn’t let someone die.” I shrug. But that’s not the whole reason.

  From that point on, there’s always at least one of the Vicious Crew at the house to watch Theo. Olivia loves it because there are finally other people to talk to besides me. Theo stays unconscious for several days. The doctor comes each day and tells us that if nothing changes soon then he’s probably not going to make it.

  Daire and Alec end up sneaking into the hospital and steal a couple bags of blood—I don’t know how they manage to do it, but t
hey do. After Theo receives a transfusion, he opens his eyes for the first time in days. All of us are so relieved it’s like a massive weight that was crushing the basement is finally removed and we can all breathe again.

  Once Theo regains consciousness, I’m placed on unofficial nurse duty. The other three guys have to go deal with stuff in Marter and start leaving us alone again. From what Olivia and I are able to get out of the guys we find out that the town is basically on lockdown. Most students have stopped going to school, and the streets are even more deserted than normal.

  The Vicious Crew tells us that not a lot has happened yet. Both sides are waiting to see what the other does, and tension is insanely thick. Theo being shot was the worst thing that’s happened so far. Alec told me that Daire wanted to go after the East Marters for what they did to Theo, but that his dad told him it wasn’t time yet.

  “Does Daire always listen to his dad?” I ask. I find it hard to imagine someone as dominant as Daire taking orders.

  Alec looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Everyone listens to Daire’s dad. The man is powerful. He runs this region’s branch of the mafia. He could have any of us wiped out in the blink of an eye.”

  “Oh.”

  Olivia and I both agree there’s something off that we don’t understand. None of them will explain why they care so much about protecting us. They offer weak excuses like they feel obligated to make sure nothing happens to us because we live at Brax’s place so we are kind of his responsibility—which we both know is bullshit. There’s something they aren’t telling us.

  I’m redressing Theo’s wound one day when suddenly he says in a thick, croaky voice, “Thanks, Nightingale.”

  I look up at his face, startled. My hands are still on his thick torso. His skin beneath my palms is now warm, whereas a few days ago it was cold to the touch, and I enjoy running my hands along it as I take care of him.

  “Hey, Theo,” I say softly. “How are you feeling?”